Collateral Constraints, Wage Rigidity, and Jobless Recoveries

The Great Recession has drawn attention to the importance of macro-financial linkages. In this paper I explore the joint role of imperfections in labor and financial markets for the cyclical adjustment of the labor market. I show that jobless recoveries emerge when, upon exiting a recession, firms are faced with deteriorating credit conditions. On the financial side, collateral requirements affect the cost of borrowing for firms. On the employment side, hiring frictions and wage rigidity increase the need for credit, making the binding collateral constraint more relevant. In a general equilibrium business cycle model with search and matching frictions, I illustrate that tightening credit conditions calibrated from data negatively affect employment adjustments during recovery periods. Wage rigidity substantially amplifies this mechanism, generating empirically plausible fluctuations in employment and output.

Automation and sectoral reallocation

Empirical evidence in Dauth et al. (J Eur Econ Assoc, 2021) suggests that industrial robot adoption in Germany has led to a sectoral reallocation of employment from manufacturing to services, leaving total employment unaffected. We rationalize this evidence through the lens of a general equilibrium model with two sectors, matching frictions and endogenous participation. Automation induces firms to create fewer vacancies and job seekers to search less in the automatable sector (manufacturing). The service sector expands due to the sectoral complementarity in the production of the final good and a positive wealth effect for the household. Analysis across steady states shows that the reduction in manufacturing employment can be offset by the increase in service employment. The model can also replicate the magnitude of the decline in the ratio of manufacturing employment to service employment in Germany between 1994 and 2014.

Uncertainty, Wages, and the Business Cycle*

We show that limited wage flexibility in economic downturns generates strong and state-dependent amplification of uncertainty shocks. It also explains the cyclical behavior of empirical measures of uncertainty. In the presence of matching frictions, an occasionally binding constraint on downward wage adjustment enhances the concavity of firms’ hiring rule, resulting in an endogenous profit-risk premium. In turn, higher uncertainty increases the profit-risk premium when the economy operates close to the wage constraint, deepening a recession. Non-linear local projections and VAR estimates support the model predictions. In addition, we show that measured uncertainty rises in a recession even without uncertainty shocks.

Frictions in a Competitive, Regulated Market: Evidence from Taxis

This paper presents a dynamic equilibrium model of a taxi market. The model is estimated using data from New York City yellow cabs. Two salient features by which most taxi markets deviate from the efficient market ideal are, first, matching frictions created by the need for both market sides to physically search for trading partners, and second, regulatory limitations to entry. To assess the importance of these features, we use the model to simulate the effect of changes in entry, alternative matching technologies, and different market density. We use the geographical features of the matching process to back out unobserved demand through a matching simulation. The matching function exhibits increasing returns to scale, which is important to understand the impact of changes in this market and has welfare implications. For instance, although alternative dispatch platforms can be more efficient than street-hailing, platform competition is harmful because it reduces effective density. (JEL C78, L51, L84, L92, L98, R48)

Venture Capital and the Macroeconomy

I develop a model of venture capital (VC) intermediation that quantitatively explains central empirical facts about VC activity and can evaluate its macroeconomic relevance. The impact of VC-backed innovations is significantly larger than suggested by observed aggregate venture exit valuations, even after accounting for large exposures to systematic and uninsurable idiosyncratic risks. The risk properties of venture capital play a quantitatively important role in both explaining empirical regularities and shaping the value of ventures’ contributions to economic growth. The model is analytically tractable and yields exact solutions, despite the presence of matching frictions, imperfect risk sharing, and endogenous growth. Received January 16, 2018; editorial decision November 7, 2018 by Editor Stijn Van Nieuwerburgh.

Resurrecting the Role of the Product Market Wedge in Recessions

Employment and hours are more cyclical than dictated by productivity and consumption. This intratemporal labor wedge can arise from product or labor market distortions. Based on employee wages, the literature has attributed the intratemporal wedge almost entirely to labor market distortions. Because wages may be smoothed versions of labor's true cyclical price, we instead examine the self-employed and intermediate inputs, respectively. For recent decades in the United States, we find price markup movements are at least as cyclical as wage markup movements. Thus, countercyclical price markups deserve a central place in business-cycle research, alongside sticky wages and matching frictions. (JEL E24, E32, E63, J31, J41)